Chapter 6
Well, that was a personal attack.
I don’t know if I want to live as the Sage of Wrath anymore, but Zan is right. I need to decide what that even means.
He won’t tell me why this visit will help, though, other than to say that Nomi, the person whose house we’re now approaching, is the one we need to talk to about supplies for the cottage.
Her house itself is exuding magical pressure, though. The only reason I’m not instantly on alert is because the magic feels like Zan’s, but I still have to ask, “Why does this house have so much of you in it?”
He cuts me a sharp look. “That’s right, with the Quiet down sages will be able to feel that, won’t they?”
“Even priests would be able to feel this, unless their training is vastly inferior now too,” I tell him.
Zan swears.
I maybe take a little too much pleasure in getting that honest of a reaction out of him.
“It’s because it used to be Kovan and Tasa’s house,” he explains.
“Once their children were older, they moved to town so they could be nearer to other families and left the mountain cottage for future sages. Since Tasa was a null, my scales made it possible for her to live here without destroying the magic of her own home constantly.”
Aha. “And the person we need to see just happens to live here.”
Zan’s eyes glimmer with appreciation. “No, it isn’t an accident. Come on.”
He takes the last few steps to the door of the house and knocks before I can interrogate him further about what must, in some sense, be his house that he also doesn’t live in.
“Not a good time!” a woman’s voice calls from inside.
Zan’s eyes narrow. “It’s me, Nomi,” he replies, his volume elevated to carry but somehow not a yell.
A pause, and then the rapid approach of footsteps, like the woman is running to the door.
She throws it open, and I get my first glimpse of the woman he’s installed in his house.
Nomi is older, on the early side of middle-aged—perhaps in her forties?
—and in her prime, with faint lines creasing her face and a stocky, solid build, her toned muscles accentuated by her fitted top and pants.
She’s tan like she works outdoors and her hair is cropped close to her head, almost like the hairstyles I saw on men in town but still undeniably feminine.
“Zan, thank goodness you’re here,” she says fervently. “We don’t know what happened, but Teren is struggling— Who’s this?”
Nomi finishes sharply, almost accusingly.
In a flash of insight, I realize Zan has probably never brought a person with him before.
“Can we come in?” Zan asks. “There are things we should speak of, and I promised her ice cream.”
I blink, breaking what I belatedly realize was probably a too-intent stare at the woman in Zan’s house to look at him. “Ice cream?”
I’ve seen ices before, crushed ice flavored with juice and eaten with a spoon.
I wasn’t permitted to try them.
But ice cream implies something else. Have people of this era poured cream into their ices now, too?
“We save the ice cream for special occasions,” Nomi says in a neutral voice, and I look back to see her giving Zan a searching look.
“I know,” Zan says. And then: “Please.”
Now it’s her turn to blink, and then her eyes narrow.
She gives me a look—wondering why I deserve a special exception, which I am wondering too; or perhaps that is projection, and she is wondering why Zan would bring a stranger to discuss magical happenings to her door—and finally says slowly, “All right. Come in.”
She holds open the door and Zan gestures me to precede him in.
I shake my head rapidly. I don’t know what the customs are for entering a person’s home are in this era. I barely know that they existed in mine, on account of I was never invited to individual homes. And wherever I went, it was with an escort determining my behavior.
Zan frowns for a second and then his eyes widen in a flash of understanding.
“Is there a problem?” Nomi asks sharply.
I freeze. In trying not to, in not acting, I’ve already messed up. I can’t even enter a home right—
Gently, Zan presses a hand against my back and propels me inside.
I’m so startled that I let him, my budding panic diverted by the warmth of him at my back, at the tingle of sensation that courses through me.
And then we are over the threshold, and the door shuts behind us.
Then more footsteps bound toward us. Nomi whips toward the sound and starts to say something, but Zan throws his other arm out, covering her mouth.
This time I think it’s her who’s startled by the touch—does she feel what I do, or is it that Zan has touched her at all?—and it’s just long enough for another person to burst into the room.
“Is that Zan? Does he know what—”
This time it’s a much younger man—maybe my apparent age, early twenties. He has bright green eyes; light brown, messy hair; a golden complexion; with a very slight build in comparison to Nomi, like a young cherry blossom tree next to a mature oak.
In fact, they don’t look like they could be related at all. And those eyes...
I suck in a breath. The dragon magic masked it at first, but—
“Oh, sorry,” the young man says, looking flustered at me. “I didn’t realize there was—”
“You’re a sage,” I blurt.
Nomi shoves away from Zan even as the sage’s golden skin tone goes white as the blood drains away in fear, and he turns to bolt.
“Teren, wait,” Zan says sharply. “Everyone is safe here.” He looks at me. “You can tell?”
“Of course I can tell. It’s faint, but—”
“Wait, you’re a sage?” the young man—Teren—blurts back.
I didn’t want anyone to know.
At least, I hadn’t decided I wanted anyone to know yet.
Anger flames up in me at Zan, who very deliberately arranged this situation—preventing Nomi from intervening, not warning me—knowing I wasn’t ready yet, knowing that I was trusting him.
Very deliberately, I remove his hand from my back.
I don’t want him touching me now.
I look at Zan for just a moment. Long enough to communicate that. Something flickers in his gaze—disappointment, I think, and how dare he, given what he just pulled—but he inclines his head in acknowledgement.
Touching privileges revoked.
But I am well trained in managing my anger, and I’m aware that it is my own blurting that revealed me; he didn’t make me say anything, even if he arranged the circumstances.
I take a breath and own that. “Yes. I am a sage.”
It is, after all, true.
Even if I choose not to use my power ever again, nothing will change the fact that I have it, and that its presence necessarily defines the scope of my choices.
“Okay,” Teren says slowly, and takes a breath. “Okay. And if you’re with Zan, you’re not with the Order. But—you still shouldn’t be able to tell.”
I’m beginning to see the scope of the problem.
“That’s why we’re here,” Zan says. “The Quiet has fallen.”
Nomi sucks in a breath.
Teren braces himself against the wall as his knees give out. “Oh no,” he whispers. “After all this time? I can’t stay—”
Nomi cuts in sharply. “And here is a sage, right at the same time. Did you take it down?”
I blink at her. Obviously? No one else could have?
I turn a confused look to Zan.
“The priests used to send sages to try,” Zan explained. “Like Kovan. Though they stopped centuries ago—sages aren’t strong enough anymore.”
That makes me frown deeply. I was powerful even in my own era—or perhaps, the era I was born into—but there had been other powerful sages before, and there should have been again.
The Order isn’t just controlling us. They’re weakening us, on purpose.
Then it’s Teren’s turn to suck in a breath as he whispers, “Oh my gods, you’re her, aren’t you? The Sage of Wrath?!”
I have no idea how to respond to that.
People have been awed by me before, but for my power, not for my existence.
So it’s Zan who breaks the now-fraught silence and says with a hint of testiness, “I told you she was alive.”
And how did he know, anyway, when no one else did?
Faintly, Teren says, “You did, but I thought you were just being romantic about it. Not, like, in a romance way, but I mean, spinning a dream to newly arrived sages who needed something to believe in, you know?”
We all stare at Teren, apparently united at last in an inability to believe in this characterization of Zan.
The sage blushes. “Pretend I didn’t say anything,” he mutters.
“But—” He looks at me hopefully. “Does that mean you can fix me, so it’s safe for me to stay here?
Without the Quiet I can’t suppress my power outside the house, and even here—I’ve been meditating since I woke up, but it’s too much.
If any priests come into town, now that they can without consequence, they’ll definitely sense me. ”
I push aside my anger at the idea of “fixing” him and clarify only, with a deep sense of foreboding, “Meditating?”
Teren looks confused. “You know, where you sit in one spot and try to clear your mind...” My expression must be leaking, because he finishes awkwardly, “Is that not how you do it?”
Hooooly gods.
“No,” I say. “No, that is not how a sage meditates.” I turn to Zan and say quietly, “This is why we’re really here, isn’t it? You lied to me.”
“I did not,” Zan says fiercely. “We are going to have ice cream. We are here for supplies. I told you that I would tell you more once we were here, and I am. Whoever lives in this house is the one responsible for setting newly arrived sages up with what they need to start a new life. And the warding also made it possible for a young sage who couldn’t be on his own to live here, too. ”
Before. Before I decided to wake up and cause problems, because that’s all my power has ever been.
Zan brought me here for something else, though.
But he still brought me here to use my power for something he decided, and I can’t help feeling a little betrayed by it.
Yes, I’m overwhelmed with choices, but I thought he meant to help me learn about them, not push me into them.
I remove the bow from my hair so that he can see my eyes glow.
Teren and Nomi freeze; threatened.